John Ellinger Ball Quotations

Freddy may be 16, but he can still place the ball as well as anyone.

I thought we gave the ball away. I thought we stood there and watched them attack our goal. The first principle of defending, once the ball is lost you fight to win it back, and we didn't fight to win it back.

We definitely competed. I feel bad for the guys. They competed for 90 plus minutes. You're just asking for a break, just for a ball to bounce your way. That's all it's going to take to turn it around.

We feel -- and probably Chivas feels the same way too -- you definitely get punished for your mistakes. Good teams make the ball bounce their way and sometimes we get frustrated with it not happening for us. We've had a couple games where we've said, 'Nothing bad is going to happen, we're going to make our own breaks,' but to actually say that and then play that way, it doesn't always work out.

The story of the game was how many times we turned the ball over in the midfield and create bad situations for ourselves. You just can't keep making those kinds of mistakes, giveaways, and we seemed to do that a lot.

Brian Dunseth was supposed to play forward a little bit, like an attacking midfielder. But Robert Scarlett and Adolfo Gregorio were supposed to be more offensive in the first half. A lot of times, the ball would come to them and after a second touch, they would still have space after 30 yards with the ball. We stressed that at halftime.

Story of the game was how many times can we turn the ball over in the midfield and created bad situations for ourselves defensively.

If you are an opponent watching our game film, what are you going to do? You're going to higher pressure us and make us try and cough the ball up. So we have to get better at not coughing the ball up under pressure.

It's disappointing because I know we're better than what we showed. We have too much experience on the field to give the ball away as many times as we did.

The fighting spirit was better. Pressure on the ball was better, and we played a bit more physical tonight, which was good.

It was definitely disappointing to see how they scored. We should have done better at that moment to win the ball and deal with the situation, but other than that we did really well defensively.